said, "I would rather have this than degrees from all the Universities
in Europe." The whole story is a curious proof of the respect in which
Johnson was held: for Percy's grievance was that Johnson had snubbed
him in the presence of a distinguished member of his own family, "to
whom he hoped to have appeared more respectable by showing how intimate
he was with Dr. Johnson." Johnson laughed at Percy's ballads and would
have been the last person to guess the immense influence the
publication of the _Reliques_ was to have on the development of English
literature in the next century: but he knew his value, and said he
never met him without learning something from him.

{245}

Among other men of interest with whom he may be said to have been
intimate at one time or another in his life may be mentioned his old
pupil David Garrick, the most famous and perhaps the greatest of
English actors, whom he loved and abused and would allow no one else to
abuse: Richardson, the author of _Clarissa_, who once came to his
rescue when he was arrested for debt, and of whose powers he had such a
high opinion that he declared that there was "more knowledge of the
heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_"; the two
Wartons, Joseph, the Headmaster of Winchester and editor of Pope, and
Thomas the author of the history of English Poetry and himself Poet
Laureate; both good scholars and critics who partly anticipated the
poetic tastes of the nineteenth century: Paoli, the hero of Boswell and
the Corsicans, with whom Johnson loved to dine: Douglas, Bishop of
Salisbury, who wrote against Hume and edited Clarendon; Savage, the
poet of mysterious birth whose homeless life he sometimes shared and
finally recorded: George Psalmanazar, the converted impostor, an even
more mysterious person, whom Johnson reverenced and said he "sought
after" more than any man: booksellers like Cave and Davies and the
brothers Dilly: scholarly lawyers like Sir William Scott, afterwards
{246} Lord Stowell, whom he made executor to his will, and Sir Robert
Chambers whom he reproved for tossing snails over a wall into his
neighbour's garden till he heard the neighbour was a Dissenter, on
which he said, "Oh, if so, toss away, Chambers, toss away"; and
physicians like Heberden, beloved of Cowper, whom Johnson called
_ultimus Romanorum_, and Laurence, President of the College of
Physicians, to whom he addressed a Latin Ode. All these were men of
interest